Messages - chb

You might want to buy this box set. You can have all the symphonies for a little more than a dollar per symphony and the quality is very good. Fantastic playing and the sound quality is very good (except for the symphonies they recorded first, at the end of the 80s).

Dieterich Buxtehude might interest you. He's a baroque composer who has written grand, powerful organ music in the style of Bach and some very beautiful cantatas. You can listen to his oratorio "Membra Jesu Nostri" on Youtube. Lately, it has become one of my favourite pieces of music:

The guy above me is correct. Only listening to the music can be very enjoyable but to get the full experience, you should see it performed in some way (especially if its Wagner!), even if it is just on DVD. Speaking of DVDs, does anybody have a recommendation for Wagner's Ring? I'm thinking about getting the version with Boulez as the conductor and Chereau as the director because Boulez is a good conductor and I like the idea of modernizing the Ring somewhat without being tasteless about it.

By the way, there's this wonderful essay by Bernard Shaw about the Ring. Some nice quotes:

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And now, what forces are there in the world to resist Alberic, our dwarf, in his new character of sworn plutocrat? He is soon at work wielding the power of the gold. For his gain, hordes of his fellow-creatures are thenceforth condemned to slave miserably, overground and underground, lashed to their work by the invisible whip of starvation. They never see him, any more than the victims of our "dangerous trades" ever see the shareholders whose power is nevertheless everywhere, driving them to destruction. The very wealth they create with their labor becomes an additional force to impoverish them; for as fast as they make it it slips from their hands into the hands of their master, and makes him mightier than ever. You can see the process for yourself in every civilized country today, where millions of people toil in want and disease to heap up more wealth for our Alberics, laying up nothing for themselves, except sometimes horrible and agonizing disease and the certainty of premature death. All this part of the story is frightfully real, frightfully present, frightfully modern; and its effects on our social life are so ghastly and ruinous that we no longer know enough of happiness to be discomposed by it. It is only the poet, with his vision of what life might be, to whom these things are unendurable. If we were a race of poets we would make an end of them before the end of this miserable century. Being a race of moral dwarfs instead, we think them highly respectable, comfortable and proper, and allow them to breed and multiply their evil in all directions. If there were no higher power in the world to work against Alberic, the end of it would be utter destruction.

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The government is of course established by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism. No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy; in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to produce spontaneously the social wellbeing our clumsy laws now aim at and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing trustworthy human materialfor society.

Belu is pretty decent if taken on its own, but compared to Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem, it seems very boring and superfluous to me. The problem isn't so much that it's simplified (as Conservationist said): You can't really simplify Burzum's music much further but that the riffs seem trite compared to the earlier works, that there is no discernible overarching structure like there was on the older albums and that the music lacks excitement overall. There are some enjoyable moments, but they are few and far between. I enjoyed the final track, repetitive as it was, Glemselens Elv has its moments and Kamaidalthas Nedstigning is a very catchy song (not in spite but because of the goofy clean vocals).All in all, I didn't expect much of this so I can't say I'm greatly disappointed because I didn't expect much of this but I still hoped for something better from Varg.

Try Dietrich Buxtehude, Michael Praetorius, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and Georg Böhm if you want to listen to some organ music. Don't know much about music written for other instruments from that period.

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I like the later renaissance instrumental pieces, and these would fit in this thread. Byrd is worthwhile. Who else?

Honestly, if you want to avoid listening to music you don't like, just don't listen to 20th century composers and stick with the classics. Whether you like certain modern composers or not is heavily dependant on your taste.

Granted, when you explore modern classical you will find lots of bad stuff (I find most French composers terrible, including Saint-Saens) but it's never a good idea to limit yourself because someone on the internet told you so. With that in mind, disregard what I just said about French composers and listen to Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen etc., you never know if you'll find something you'll enjoy, and even if you don't you will have learned a little more about classical music.

He is also known for his attacks on literary realism, or the idea that literature can linearly evoke reality through gritty detail, scenes of underage sodomy, and other details.

I'm confused. Where do you get the idea that Tom Wolfe is opposed to realistic novels from? You've probably studied him more extensively than me but in one essay I read from him, he compared the invention of literary realism to the invention of electricity in engineering and his novel The Bonfire of Vanities included a lot of detailed, realistic descriptions.

Psychological and realistic novels really do not seem to be the same, they're more like opposites.

See, this is why you should study a "hard" science (physics, chemistry, biology) or math if you're smart enough. Engineering is good choice, too. These subjects require you to think and you can't get through them just with memorizing textbooks. Mathematics (which is what I plan to study) is especially useful in this regard. Even if you don't plan on working in a field that has to do with maths or science, the kind of thinking you learn there will be useful no matter what you do. Stuff like history, literature and philosophy is interesting but I believe you're better off if you do studies on these subjects on your own.

I believe that this is a good idea which is especially useful for music from the modern era because Modernism encompasses such a wide range of different styles. However, I believe that most composers wrote pieces that fit into multiple categories. Shostakovich, for instance, wrote lots of "crowd-pleasing" pieces and to be honest, I find it hard to think of an "academic" piece by him. Bach would fit into all the categories you listed.

I'm sure we could do more with this but I can't think of anything right now. Maybe I'll post again if I have another idea.

Interestingly, he also seems to dislike the "pathos" of Romantic music. Romantic music already was a "degeneration" of Classical music, in a way and the Modernists merely took Romantic music to it's conclusion.

Listened to the new album once. First impressions weren't very good, the music sounded simplistic and awkward. Kind of like Beherit but for some reason it didn't captivate me as much. Probably need to listen to it again

I disagree with others here. Metallica have always been a musical powerhouse writing great melodies and rhythms, better than Iron Maiden in many ways. Their problem has been casting their eye in the wrong direction because they want to be Bon Jovi.

I agree, Metallica always had a good sense of melody and rhythm. Too bad that they wasted their ideas on songs like Nothing Else Matters. A very good rock song that is still popular for a reason but still nothing more than a rock song.

The new album has some good ideas bu as a whole it seems boring and lifeless. If you want to hear a better comeback, listen to the new Cynic instead.

It is true that some intervals are more consonant because the frequency ratios between the notes are simpler. In general, the unison, octave, fifth and fourth are always considered consonant. However, which intervals are considered dissonant varies. Thirds and sixths were deemed dissonant intervals in medieval music, but nowadays people consider them to be very consonant intervals.